Your 5-Step Checklist for a Stress-Free Holiday Season from Your Test Scripts

With an emphasis on faster development cycles, your goal should be to build testing into your entire application to increase quality while still not increasing testing time.

The holiday season and end of the year are approaching. During this time, your primary goal should be to ensure your software quality is up to par as traffic spikes in the upcoming weeks in order to continue providing optimal customer experience.

End-to-end testing is vital to ensure quality customer experience and performance. Businesses rarely have standalone products and services anymore. Instead, applications are built on a network of sub-systems and layers of complexity. When one system fails, so does the product and its customer experience. A stress-free holiday season and end of the year hinges on every unit, network, and user pathway working flawlessly. With robust testing tools and framework, teams can protect their customer experience with API and UI test automation to ensure that every layer and sub-system provides a seamless user experience.

Keep reading to get a recap of our webinar and learn how you can increase test coverage while saving time.

With an emphasis on faster development cycles, your goal should be to build testing into your entire application to increase quality while still not increasing testing time. Here are 5 tips to get you successful:

Automate Testing at the API and UI layer. In our recent State of Software Testing 2018 Industry Report, we found that only 5 percent of respondents reported not automating any of their tests. The future of testing is in automation and it’s never too early to start. Manual Testing takes a significant amount of time and doesn’t allow for robustness or application-wide test coverage. At least 50 percent of testing should be automated at the API and UI layer in order to develop and launch software faster and cheaper without compromising quality.

Our SOT 2018 report also shows that 65 percent of respondents are responsible for testing the front and backend of their applications. The importance of testing has grown exponentially, and team members must work together more than ever to deliver great software.

Make testing part of the workflow, not a single stage. It’s absolutely necessary for developers and QA engineers to work together to limit the amount of time spent in the “testing” phase of development in order to cut costs and save time. When developers and QA engineers are in sync, the feedback loop is more effective, and bugs can be caught sooner.

This concept of Shift Left brings testers and developers together earlier on in the software development cycle. Testers join design sessions and work closely with backend developers to ask questions and create test ideas and “what if” type scenarios. This approach unveils problems earlier on.

As demonstrated in the graphic below, the sooner we catch bugs in the application, the less costly it becomes to resolve and the faster time to resolution. The last thing we want is to catch bugs while monitoring in production.

Embrace data-driven testing. Data-driven testing is when you store test data (input, expected output, etc.) in some external storage and then use that data iteratively in your tests when running them. Data-driven testing enables teams to test faster by reducing redundant test steps and cutting down on test maintenance efforts.

In today’s fast-paced software development environment, it’s important that QA teams optimize their testing processes as much as possible. To test scenarios realistically, users require large data-sets. With SoapUI Pro and TestComplete, you can quickly link API tests and UI tests respectively to a data source and incorporate data in your testing.

Test at scale. Your application works as expected when there is one user, but how does it work with hundreds of thousands of users? Users have to spend inordinate amounts of time correlating dynamic characteristics, replicating client side javascript behavior to even play back a recorded interaction. Today’s tools have steep learning curves, requiring parallel sets of scripts to be built, which is challenging for Agile adoption. Choose a tool that ensures that your application can handle the peak traffic season with performance data that is accurate and actionable.

With LoadUI Pro, you can test the speed and availability of new changes to your APIs in minutes, preview API performance behaviors before releasing to product environments, and shift performance insights more to the left so developers build more reliable code.

With LoadNinja, you can create load tests quickly without complex correlation, leverage real browsers for the most realistic and accurate representation of load, and run tests at scale, so you can understand the optimize your web app performance.

Cover all possible browsers and devices. Companies need to increase test coverage for a number of mobile device configurations due to different platforms, resolutions, and capabilities. Finding a test automation solution that makes testing multiple platforms easy for customers is challenging for many software teams. Make sure your application functions as expected from all combinations with test automation tools that offer cross-platform support and live testing on over hundreds of real browsers, operating systems, and resolution configurations.

With these 5 tips, you can be positive that you are providing the most optimal customer experience this holiday season and end of year! If it’s too late in the year for you to make any changes to your organizational processes, make sure to keep this checklist in your back pocket as you go into 2019 – it may just be a gamechanger!